Michelle Liard has blood on her hands but remains a free woman — Ontario’s highest court has refused to overturn her shocking 2012 acquittal in the gruesome murder of her friend, schoolgirl Aleksandra Firgan-Hewie.

“What Michelle wants to do is get on with her life and never have to worry about courts and lawyers and judges again,” said her elated lawyer, Daniel Brodsky, who argued the case with James Lockyer. “My client absolutely hopes it’s over and that’s the end of it.”

But Aleks’s grandparents are hoping just the opposite — that the Crown will now appeal to the highest court in the land. They remain convinced Liard was in on planning the vicious slaying that saw their granddaughter stabbed 37 times by Rafal LaSota, Liard’s boyfriend, on Dec. 10, 2008.

LaSota is serving a life term for first-degree murder. Even though by her own admission she invited Aleks over, never tried to help her, washed her boyfriend’s bloody clothes and initially lied to help cover up what LaSota did, she’s managed to walk away with no criminal record.

LaSota and Liard befriended Firgan-Hewie soon after she moved from the Hewies’ home in Port Perry to live with her dad in Mississauga. Anxious to fit in, she hung out with the older group that smoked pot and drank in the tunnel under the Clarkson GO bridge.

According to prosecutors, LaSota, 25, and Liard, 19, were an evil couple who lured Firgan-Hewie to her death.

During her trial, Liard admitted inviting Aleks to join them at LaSota’s home and later hearing muffled screams coming from his bedroom. She also testified to washing Aleks’s blood from her boyfriend’s clothes and spending 7 1/2 hours in the house after the frenzied slaying.

But she insisted she had no part in the planning or execution of the murder.

While Peel Regional Police later found her chilling short story about the abduction and slow mutilation of a beautiful blonde, Liard maintained it was a class assignment and not a blueprint for a “thrill kill.” The jury never heard that investigators also found a binder full of disturbing writings filled with fantasies about vampirism and blood.

Liard was at the Court of Appeal last fall as the Crown sought to have her acquittal overturned. So too were the Hewies and Aleks’s maternal relatives as well. “We didn’t talk to her,” recalls grandmother Halina Firgan. “I don’t want to mention her name.”

The Crown told the appeal court that Justice David Corbett erred in allowing the jury to see Liard’s lengthy, emotional police statement when she was brought in for questioning 13 hours after Aleks’s tiny body was found in a trash bag behind LaSota’s home.

Liard had hours to rehearse her emotional sobbing, screaming and hyperventilating, prosecutors said, and the jury was unfairly swayed. If they hadn’t watched seven hours of her hysterical display, jurors may have reached a different verdict.

In their ruling released Tuesday, the appeal court shot them down on every point.

They found Corbett made no mistake in admitting Liard’s “spontaneous” police statement so the jury could judge her demeanour when first accused — and it often reflected badly on her, as the judge said: “She seemed more upset about losing her relationship with Mr. LaSota ... a man she had dated for a couple of months and who had just brutally murdered one of her friends with a knife.”

In any event, the appeal court said admitting Liard’s police statement couldn’t damage a case that wasn’t strong to begin with. Her gory short story was just a class assignment and washing his bloody clothes was to “hide what LaSota had done because she loved him,” they ruled.

“Courts frequently say we must trust the common sense of jurors,” Justice John Laskin wrote on behalf of the appeal court. “I see no reason not to trust the jury in this case.”

And so Liard remains a free woman with an unblemished record, anxious to slip back into the crowd.

“What she’d really like,” says her lawyer, “is to get on the TTC without anyone recognizing her.”